It’s that time of the year when we celebrate the love in our life and what better way to show that special person how much they mean to you than with the gift of a book? Books are the biggest love in our lives so whether you celebrate big on February 14th or prefer to ignore it, these books about love in all its forms are perfect for spoiling the one you love or just treating yourself this Valentine’s Day.
What, in your relationships, have you chosen? What would you choose, if you felt able?
In Love and Choice, therapist and journalist Lucy Fry explains why relationships should start with these simple questions. Most of us are brought up with a blueprint for our most important and intimate relationships. It comes from family, the media, or even the government’s tax policies, and the message is simple:
The (gold) standard for a romantic relationship is one that is heterosexual, between two people, and monogamous.
Lucy invites us to examine this blueprint consciously, accept that it may not be for everyone, and consider something outside the ordinary. By offering us a window into a life built on choice, and a radical approach, Lucy helps us explore what we really want, and what our relationship needs. With care, wit and candour, Fry blends insightful psychological and philosophical ideas with case studies drawn from interviews with experts, real people, and experiences in her own life.
Love and Choice gives readers everything they need to choose what, who, and how to love.
The Year of the Cat by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
When Rhiannon fell in love with, and eventually married her flatmate, she imagined they might one day move on. But this is London in the age of generation rent, and so they share their home with a succession of friends and strangers while saving for a life less makeshift.
The desire for a baby is never far from the surface, but can she be sure that she will ever be free of the anxiety she has experienced since an attack in the street one night? And after a childhood spent caring for her autistic brother, does she really want to devote herself to motherhood?
Moving through the seasons over the course of lockdown, The Year of the Cat nimbly charts the way a kitten called Mackerel walked into Rhiannon’s home and heart, and taught her to face down her fears and appreciate quite how much love she had to offer.
Delight the bookworm in your life with the gift of this hilarious and heartbreaking modern-day adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s classic, The Pursuit of Happiness.
Marooned in a sprawling farmhouse in Norfolk, teenage Linda Radlett feels herself destined for greater things. She longs for love, but how will she ever find it? She can’t even get a signal on her mobile phone. Linda’s strict, former rock star father terrifies any potential suitors away, while her bohemian mother, wafting around in silver jewellery, answers Linda’s urgent questions about love with upsettingly vivid allusions to animal husbandry.
Eventually Linda does find her way out from the bosom of her deeply eccentric extended family, and she escapes to London. She knows she doesn’t want to marry ‘a man who looks like a pudding’, as her good and dull sister Louisa has done, and marries the flashy, handsome son of a UKIP peer instead.
But this is only the beginning of Linda’s pursuit of love, a journey that will be wilder, more surprising and more complicated than she could ever have imagined.
The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan
Meet the wedding party:
THE BRIDE AND GROOM
Celine and Luke are meant to get married and live happily ever after. But Celine’s more interested in playing the piano, and Luke’s a serial cheater.
THE BRIDESMAID
Phoebe, Celine’s sister, is meant to finish college and get a real job. Instead she pulls pints, lives with six flatmates, and has no long-term aspirations beyond smoking her millionth cigarette.
THE BEST MAN
Archie, Luke’s best friend and ex-boyfriend, is meant to move up the corporate ladder and on from Luke. Yet he stands where he is, admiring the view.
THE GUEST
Vivian, Luke’s other best friend and other ex, was meant to put up with Luke’s bullshit when they dated. But she didn’t. And now she is contented, methodically observing her friends like ants.
As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after – but does it lie at the end of an aisle?
It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at a university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink.
Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant.
Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.
From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming’s transition.
Through a spiral of unforeseen crises – some personal, some professional, some life-altering – Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?
One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street. If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt.
There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.
As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’.
And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.
Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain
How do you find the courage to make your own life?
Marianne Clifford, teenage daughter of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, falls helplessly and absolutely for eighteen-year-old Simon Hurst, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents.
But fate intervenes. Simon’s plans are blown off course, he leaves for Paris and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together.
Finding her way in 1960s Chelsea, and supported by her courageous Scottish friend, Petronella, she continues to seek the life she never stops craving. And in Paris, beneath his blithe exterior, Simon Hurst continues to nurse the secret which will alter everything.
Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola
Bolu Babalola finds the most beautiful love stories from history and mythology and rewrites them with incredible new detail and vivacity in this debut collection. Focusing on the magical folktales of West Africa, Babalola also reimagines iconic Greek myths, ancient legends from the Middle East, and stories from countries that no longer exist in our world.
A high-born Nigerian goddess feels beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover and longs to be truly seen.
A young businesswoman attempts to make a great leap in her company, and an even greater one in her love life.
A powerful Ghanaian spokeswoman is forced to decide whether to uphold her family’s politics, or to be true to her heart.
Whether captured in the passion of love at first sight, or realising that self-love takes precedent over the latter, the characters in these vibrant stories try to navigate this most complex human emotion and understand why it holds them hostage.
Moving exhilaratingly across perspectives, continents and genres, from the historic to the vividly current, Love in Colour is a celebration of romance in all of its forms.
Alexa, what is there to know about love? by Brian Bilston
The perfect, witty gift for Valentine’s and beyond.
Alexa, what is there to know about love? is a wonderful collection of poems by Brian Bilston, Twitter’s ‘unofficial poet laureate’, in which he frets over the challenges of modern life, extols the pleasures of books, broods over politics, and ponders the curiosities of language.
But at its heart, this is a collection of poems about love. From our caveman days to the internet era, from first dates to love in old age, Alexa, what is there to know about love? has a love poem for every time, place and occasion – and will stir the soul of even the most jaded romantic.